Interrogation Day
by Forensiphile
Summary: Finding the cog turned out to be easier than removing it.


Title: Interrogation Day  
  
Author: Devanie Maxwell  
  
Rating: PG-13 (profanity)  
  
Category: VHA  
  
Spoilers: Are You Now or Have You Ever Been...  
  
Summary: Finding the cog turned out to be easier than removing it  
  
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters below. They belong to Hank Steinberg, CBS, and Jerry Bruckheimer. I would like to have possession of Jason Farrell, however.  
  
Notes: To M, for being such an amazing beta, writer, and lover of Farrell. This one wouldn't exist if not for you. :)  
  
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I wasn't there about Samir.  
  
I wasn't there to talk about Samir or some argument Agent Spade had with her boss over his investigation. If she had been the subject of an OPR investigation before she would have known that.  
  
But she hadn't and she didn't. They rarely do.  
  
Blindsiding works on the element of suprise. The affair question was nothing more than an officially sanctioned shot in the dark. There were logs. There were access records. Did either of those things mean anything? Did the look on her face?  
  
Maybe she was just taken aback by the question. More telling was her expression when I insinuated that she wasn't much more than Malone's whore. I would have told me to fuck myself. I admire her restraint. Twelve years in this job and I rarely feel guilt for the havoc I cause in my wake. More often than not an agent gets sloppy and Internal Affairs is called in to scare them into following protocol. Coerced confessions and report inconsistencies pale in comparison to the cost of finding and training new agents who will just coerce confesssions and write inconsistent reports.  
  
I didn't care if Samantha Spade was sleeping with her boss. I'm sure she was. Maybe still is. I'm sure she'd be surprised that it wasn't even the object of my line of questioning. I wanted to do what I had from the beginning--stir up a political hornets' nest, create distrust. Somewhere in the office was the cog that, when removed, would deconstruct Malone completely.  
  
I thought I might have found it.  
  
His bursting into my office didn't surprise me. I had been waiting for that for the better part of two days. It was more a matter of what would push his buttons. It wasn't a secret around the Bureau that Jack Malone was quick to temper and impulsive when he felt he, his team, or his cases were compromised. What the FBI needed was proof. Proof that he lacked the objectivity needed to do his job.  
  
Three things could happen. He could commit some egregious form of insubordination and be sacked out of the Bureau. He could resign in hopes of saving some of his reputation and spend the rest of his professional life manning security checkpoints on the border to some godforsaken part of Canada. Or --  
  
~"You come into MY house and mess with MY people you better not miss, you little pisswad."~  
  
He could kill another federal agent and spend the rest of his years in prison.  
  
Option three was looking more likely.  
  
My mind ran through the scenarios and quickly formed a hypothesis. Spade had told Malone about our discussion from earlier, hence his assertion that I was a maggot and a garbage-picker. In my experience the name calling only starts when you cut a little too deep. Agents who fudge reports and lose files usually bend over in order to better their situation. It's the personal indiscretions where the investigatee goes on the offensive. Typically they have more to lose.  
  
Pencils came flying across my desk and I wondered just how far he would go to make a point. I had seen it all. Evidence tampering at the Houston office. Intra-departmental homicide in Detroit. I had made a lot of accusations and had many more leveled at me, but this was the first time office supplies came into play. I was weighing my options-- call security or escape in the most intimidating way possible-- when Johnson came into the room. She's an agent who's going places. Motivated, professional, non- violent...  
  
She talked Malone down and he left, but not without a thinly veiled threat. I began to question Agent Johnson. Typical stuff. Played the ambition card while appealing to her own high standard of ethics. I knew before she entered the office that nothing formative would come out of our meeting, so I spent the time starting my report on Malone. Volatile. Loose cannon. Reckless with his career and others.  
  
Words that could end his career from statements that were circumstantial at best. The more I talked to his team the less I believed he was a real flaw in the system. Four out of five agents probably would have ordered the kill shot for Samir, given that situation, that day. Taylor roughed up a few suspects, but not anything that doesn't happen every hour in offices around the country. I doubted there were any section heads that reminded their agents daily that the suspects have a friend in the federal government. He was out of line with me, but I had just interrogated his mistress about a relationship that might very well still be going on. I didn't know. I didn't care, even as I idly wondered what he was more concerned about-- damage to his reputation and marriage, or damage to her.  
  
I couldn't blame him. She was young, attractive. Probably as tenacious in bed as she is in an argument. I expect to see her again in a few years when some male agent on the fast track to Washington files a complaint about an agent in their division sleeping her way to the top. She denied the relationship in our meeting, but it will get out. It always does.  
  
Hours pass and I have what I need. The Office of Professional Responsibility is an internal watchdog. We're not some independent whistle blower of a department that stringently looks out for the best interests of all its people. We're not just given a problem. We're given a solution. The solution in this case was definitive: Jack Malone needed to be removed. I'm not told why, just the means of removal.  
  
There's movement in the doorway and Spade, Johnson, and Taylor enter the office in some obviously rehearsed display of solidarity. Spade calls me a bastard. Johnson tells me to shove it. I project well practiced self- righteousness and tell them my work isn't done.  
  
It's done. I put down a face card and they played an ace. While my report will say that all three agents were 'uncooperative and non-responsive,' what it essentially boils down to is that they called my bluff. You don't spend 1.2 million dollars of federal money to train three new agents when you're only targeting one. If more agents knew that it would make the revolving door move a lot more slowly.  
  
It's done. I failed to achieve my objective.  
  
Then why don't I feel like I failed?  
  
FIN 


End file.
